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Martin Harrison

A Note on Modernism: for The New Australian Poetry

Part 1 of 2

This piece was first published in New Poetry vol 27 no 4, 1980. It is 2,300 words or about six printed pages long.

You can read Part 2 on this site.

So far, in the first few months after its appearance from Makar, there have been a few relatively favourable and largely unpenetrating notices of John Tranter’s The New Australian Poetry. Perhaps this lack of penetration is the result of the media’s limited space, perhaps not. Is it, instead, a sign of weariness (or extreme wariness) in entering once again the conflict which was brought into Australian poetry with the emergence of the late 60s generation of poets whom Tranter has anthologised? Or is it an indication that the poetic achievement the anthology signals has been let pass, has been let become canonical — somehow too close and yet already too “established” to be open to further understanding and discussion? I hope, myself, that the answer is negative to both of my suggestions, for the anthology has a number of very important bearings upon the future of Australian writing, particularly at the present when much of the seemingly inherent fervour and energy of that generation’s new writing appears, as mysteriously as the power of the dollar, to have abated. Indeed, it has always seemed to me that the adversary critics of the new poetry have, despite their dismissive methods, brought critical discussion closer to the point at issue. In this sense, Peter Kocan — writing in December’s “The Critic” as the only recent adversary commentator — recognises the anthology’s central issue and then, in pursuit of an ingenuous but irrelevant poetic of his own, completely fails to understand it. But unlike the more favourable critics who would simply include the book as yet another couple of hundred kilometres in the Australian poetic way, at least he sees that what’s at stake in The New Australian Poetry is an idea about the writing of poetry which is thoroughly different from most of what has preceded it. Then, as so many critics and readers have done in the past, he shows how incapable he is of discriminating amongst this new and presumably unwelcome reading.
    For John Tranter’s intentions are quite clear, and should be clearly stated. By selecting the work of some of his generation’s poets, he has attempted to begin establishing an Australian version of modernism. I suppose one could say that, historically, The New Australian Poetry is an attempt to reverse the barbarous work of Stewart and McAuley in the late 40s — though they as mere writers may, to be fair, have been the least responsible for the intellectual strait-jacketing which followed the war in most Western countries. Tranter has, in other words, produced a book which questions polemically a certain kind of imperviousness in Australian poetry to innovation overseas and which quarrels deeply with the increasingly out-dated British academic and poetic tradition invoked in defence of that insularity. His criterion for choosing amongst the poetry of his contemporaries is a precise one: he looked, he writes in his introduction, for poets who had “that commitment to the overhauling of poetic method and function that seems to become necessary from time to time in any culture.” His bête noir in reading is “that Common Room Humanism ... as apt to sermonise as any minority belief” whose ancestry he satirizes as “by Matthew Arnold, out of Doctor Leavis, via Victorian England”. Both these quotes, too, should alert us to another clear intention in the anthology: to produce a collection of poetry which exemplifies his notion of modernist “overhauling” and only as an equal but not totally determinant aim to produce an anthology which contains the best of his generation. This ideological aim makes this book of 24 poets a much more avowedly documentary anthology than most. What’s more, it’s even a retrospective anthology in which most of the poems come from the early 70s, for Tranter himself (and I agree with him) sees this period of overhauling “that began around 1968… now drawing to a close”. The New Australian Poetry is not, given these two intentions, a particularly easy book to read at first sight or bring into perspective.
    So: modernism, here, in Australia. And a modernism identified specifically with what will in time come to be seen as the relatively early works of an impressively large generation of poets — the generation of Tranter himself, of Martin Johnston, Robert Adamson, Vicki Viidikas, Michael Dransfield, John Forbes, Kris Hemensley and (by this generation’s identification) many poems of Bruce Beaver. I’m not concerned to argue whether, or not, other names should have been included beyond Tranter’s 24, though they might have been: Tranter looked for a grouping of poets who had in practice worked together. Also I wonder (and doubt) whether Tranter would disagree with me that there have been other partial modernist initiatives in Australian poetry before the mid-60s. I think that basically he is right in broad terms in seeing modernism as the particular discovery and contribution of the generation he collects. And yet: modernism… it’s a term which already, like the Romanticism it has replaced, seems these days to be in need of fresh definition every time it’s used.
    To me it’s a pity that Tranter felt himself — perhaps pressured by likely reactions of dismay — obliged to discuss modernism in his introduction in broadly theoretic rather than locally applicable terms. Yet the main features of his description have some precise emphases. He is interested mainly in a poetry which reflects a modern lack of philosophical certainties and is relatively free of ethical or religious notions. He has looked for a poetry which stresses process, movement and impression over conclusiveness and resolved statements: he has looked in other words for poems which display their own tentativeness in linguistic performance and insight. He has, accordingly and almost inevitably, been more concerned with poems which turn inward, and reveal psychological events as the central constituents of perception rather than poems which address external events as prompts for the individual poet’s commentary. “This,” he writes, “is one of the tenets of modernism: that the mental landscape can be displayed as being more variable, complex and humanly meaningful that the external, because it includes the ‘real world’ as one of its many attributes.” And in relation to these ideas he has gathered together poetry which locates the central notion of the value of literature in the complex ways a reader re-creates the poem’s experience rather than a poetry which deliberately uses literary means to persuade a reader of the rightness of the poet’s allegiance to a given set of values. Tranter is interested, in other words, in a functional notion of value rather than a mimetic one. Finally, this functional notion of value has turned Tranter’s (and most of the anthologised poets’) attention sharply on to executive properties of a poem, on to its language, its style and its power of re-organising and representing experience though structure. “In all these poems,” Tranter writes, “words — the fragments of language the poet places in the special framework of a poem — have a reality more solid and intense than the world of objects and sense-perception .... (These poets) have instead devoted their energies to that field of human action where their skills and talents arm them with a unique authority, where meaning embodies itself as speech, and words emerge ... as that voyage of discovery, literature.” He has looked, in fact, quite narrowly for poems which capture that trait of much of the most adventurous of modern writing — its linguisticism, its conscious homing in on language as a medium or assemblage of codes.
    Despite its abstract formulation, Tranter’s definition indisputably speaks of core elements in any understanding of modernism. Whatever else there is to be said, Tranter’s definition tells us something vital about development between Tennyson’s poems of the 1830s and Wordsworth’s of 1800, between Rimbaud’s and Musset’s, between the imagists and Browning: and, certainly, he expresses main preoccupations of many more recent poets in Europe, South America and the USA — clearly, the best of these poets. Yet, to me, Tranter’s definition also brings us to the heart of a problem: that his is a formalistic definition, that it delineates “conditions for” rather than “content after”. It can only adequately be understood as a reactive definition, as a definition in opposition to another idea of writing.
    What do I feel is wrong with that? Nothing, in the sense that Tranter may well judge accurately the kind of critical and poetic work still to be done in Australia and may well be right in pitching his sights against a continuance, like a steady undertow, of a self-styled “traditionalist” neo-Georgianism which has persisted undaunted (even pre-eminent in Britain) as a tradition of a minor poetry. Of course, such an opposing definition is itself a formalistic one to which — as a stereotype —  a baggage of moral and religious postulates have been ascribed and which may, again, leave unnoticed the actual achievements of such poets. The certainty of persona-voice, the clarity of ostensive reference, the suppression of metaphor and image-reference in the central thought, the resolution of that thought in conclusiveness all bring a poem such as James McAuley’s “Released on Parole” within that neo-Georgian spectrum.

Out walking in July
I see wind, cloud and light
Weave pictures in the sky.
Blest by so clear a sight,
I never want to look
At shadows in a book.

Light snow there on bare rock:
A hawk balanced in air:
And over his cirrus flock
The sun’s silver stare
Saying, Look what I give:
Won’t you consent to live?

Well, I consent: I’ll try.
I’ve done twenty years hard —
A life term, God knows why,
With exercise in the yard.
And alas, to have done time
Becomes itself a crime.

In enforcing such a contrast, I don’t mean to score off points: McAuley’s poem has many, perhaps too obvious, competencies. Indeed, had I chosen a later poem of his such as “Nocturne” (recently republished in Poems from The Age) then I might have found the contrast more difficult to present. For such formalistic oppositions between modernist and traditionalist take us only a certain way. They leave untouched what must to my mind be the key difference between these poetries — between their semantic bearings, their differences in intentionality, between (if I can skirt the matter of “value” for a moment) their meanings.
    Such grounds for discrimination are, naturally, founded on some agreed formalistic notion of modernism — but Tranter’s definition would not give me cause, were I obliged to be judgmental, to say that McAuley’s poem is minor. I believe that it is. And I would want to contrast that judgement — thinking personally, for instance, of recent reading of George Oppen’s later poems, or O’Hara’s “In Memory of my Feelings”, or Cesar Vallejo’s post-1918 poems — with the fact that nearly all major poetry I can think of this century has been modernist. Making such a judgement would bring me back to the semantic re-ordering of poetry which is part of modernism — in short, to questions of meaning and ways of meaning. The linguisticism of modernist poetry (so rebarbative a feature to traditionalist critics) can’t be overlooked.
    What do I feel then might be limited in Tranter’s definition of modernism? It’s a narrow and effectively polemical definition which itself tends to make one overlook the great diversity of modernisms represented in his collection and even to obscure the criterion. I find at least five quite distinct, sometimes opposing, modernisms represented — abstraction, expressionism, pop realism, surrealism, open form — and one or two poems (e.g. Michael Dransfield’s “That Which We Call a Rose”) which are only dubiously modernist. One of the more recondite fascinations of the book is to see, now that Tranter has given us the context, how the more significant poets of his generation master this diversity in their own work. What’s more, there’s the fact that modernism as the late 60s generation experienced it was almost wholly channeled through the discovery of post-war American writing — and so, upon the rediscovery of what American poets had themselves selected from earlier poetry both in the USA and Europe. I’m not disputing the cultural relevance of the American connection: it was felt in every English-speaking country, but perhaps most appropriately here. But The New Australian Poetry gives little cognizance (as the poets themselves did not) to those less predominant strands of modernism which are, for example, realist, mythological, folkloric, primitivist or consciously neo-traditional. The painterly, urban, psychological concerns of a significant, but not total, number of post-war American poets has captured a still somewhat frontier-bound and deliberately technology-dependent attention. It needn’t necessarily be an adverse criticism that this is so. But it is a fact inherent in the materials collectable that Tranter’s anthology keeps its distance from other major modernists such as Lorca, Felipe, Ritsos, Seferis, much of Neruda and much of what might be found in early Japanese, Chinese or Tamil poetry — and so on. Not to mention what might have been visible more locally still. How different Australian poets have been from Australian composers, who have never had quite the same battle against anti-internationalism which for contemporary writers has been fought round only modernism. Despite the flood of translations of modernist poets writing in non-English language traditions, the Australian focus on literary modernism has been much more narrow than its musical equivalent in relation to international musical modernism. These translations (mainly from Spanish-language, French, Russian and Italian modernists) co-existed, for instance, with the influential flourishing of the New York school but they seem to have had much less impact.
    The late 60s feeling was that, starkly mirrored in the period’s political and moral bankruptcy, poets and readers had been denied proper access to modern poetry for too long and for too trivially littérateur reasons. Is the modernism of The New Australian Poetry, then, a narrow focus which zooms in on the “new” with a certain extremism? Perhaps so. But if so, it’s an extremism taken up for the simple reason that an excellent poetry could be written in Australia. There was (in more than one sense) a good deal of justice in thinking that the conditions for a larger, a more major poetry had to be constructed: and that for this, the context and the ground of Australian poetry needed shifting. Myself, I’m not particularly concerned that one surface and extremely apparent feature of this shifting was, literally, back from country-station to Sydney terrace, from a mainly rural poetry to an urban one. Tranter’s own definition of modernism gives the proto-physical factors which allowed for that change.
    What was more important was the creation of a kind of “forcefield” of aesthetic preoccupations within which a certain sort of innovative poetry would cohere. Of these, the most important in my own view is the emphasis on process, on envisaging a poem’s structure as a not necessarily completed structure of perceptions. Denying conclusiveness, this open-ended idea of structure released the poets from the imperative need to make obeisance to their cultural predicament (i.e. Australian “reality” shading off into artistic “realism”) before they began writing any poem. True, as in all modernist poetry, cultural predicament lies in, is part of, the unfolding of the poem’s form — surely, the only reason why poets can and do change the formal dimensions of their art. But a commitment to openness is essential if poetry is to stay alive and is not to be rendered incapable of dealing with the “whole” situation, if it is not to be reduced to each man’s individual humanism.
    As sustained a glance as you can bear at any recent British anthology shows what such a failure to change means in terms of loss of real vision and ultimately of real facts about the world around. So it is not surprising that adversary critics should repeatedly insist that modern Australian poets perpetrate exactly that failure and should constantly equate a poetry of process with their reductive claim that such writing is nothing more than poetry about writing poetry. In opposition to that view, the claim which Tranter makes that the real world should be seen as an attribute of the perception and language in which it is revealed is not only philosophical good sense but relatively conservative good sense.  And perhaps the deeper point in John Forbes’ “Four Heads & How to do Them” is that there is no period in which conceptions of the ‘real’ have not been self-consciously mirrored as a central pre-occupation in conceptions of art. In fact, it is hard to think of any major poem which achieves its “statements” and does not consciously oblige the reader to understand the further meanings of its form and technique. Again, it is minor art which tells us that the “real” is self-evident and that its values need only to be educed. What comes out clearly all the way through The New Australian Poetry is the writers’ commitment to that re-discovery of the real in and through their writing.  For no doubt time and culture, too, will catch up on all of us.
    Perhaps the late 60s poets were unnecessarily fastidious (or wanted to think themselves so) in clearing out restrictions.  Tranter singles out another poem by John Forbes, his “T.V.”, and has this to say about it:  “Whatever else John Forbes may have intended his poem to do, it is at least certain that he is not concerned with persuading the reader to accept his view of human destiny: ethics, morality, religion and mythology are distinctly absent from the writer’s concerns.” (This poem is quoted in Tranter’s article on pages 14 & 15 of this issue [of New Poetry].)
    And yes, this is not a poem which immediately offers conclusiveness of a moral or ethical kind. But a reader who wished to argue the point could say that it does so in other ways. This reader’s reading — devitalising though it would be of the poem’s language-play which resists immediate de-coding — would perhaps go like this:  This poem asks us to experience again the semi-dream state in which we watch T.V. and tells us something about the implicitly sterile messages of T.V. culture, which are identified in the poem by the voyeuristic nature of 1.) western anthropology and 2.) T.V. anthropology documentaries made by figures like “the unlucky Doctor Mathews”.  The poem tells us (the undaunted reader would go on) that the only substantial thing in our apparently effortless perceptions of other cultures such as the native hunter’s is our technology, our weather-resistant cameras — but the poet adds a further irony to his piece by adopting throughout the voice of an authoritarian telecaster, in order to emphasise this rather negative conclusion. And so on.
    To be sure, this reader’s efforts are unattractive whether over this or any other poem. Forbes’ poem in particular is written for a different and more sensitive kind of reading. Yet neither is the reader’s interpretive procedure entirely illegitimate: and certainly it brings out the fact that “T.V.” is by no means as insulated from a certain order of ethical and moral pre-occupations. What then of Tranter’s claim that “(Forbes’) is not concerned with persuading the reader to accept his view of human destiny?” Surely, the point is that a poet setting out to write a poem with all these opinionated, semi-moral pre-occupations firmly established in his mind (or with an intention of arriving at them) would have written a very different poem from “T.V.” and, arguably, a much inferior poem. I believe, in other words, that Tranter is talking about a compositional method rather than what, in reading, has actually come about. Again, I think he is talking of ‘‘conditions for” rather than “content after”. For what we find in “T.V.” and what our conclusion-hunting reader overlooked is a poetry in which language and images have been allowed to develop themselves tentatively and openly in relation to the poet’s ideas. And what has been allowed for, by the poet’s not pre-supposing a set of opinionated, semi-moral pre-occupations, is a foregrounding of the poem’s structure, a humour, and the possibility of range. “T.V.” works both specifically and non-specifically: it allows further dimensions, and it persuades by choice. Significantly, had the poet set out with those firm moral intentions in mind, he would have written a poem in manner similar to McAuley’s “Released on Parole”.

    Would I then, if obliged to say, assert that “T.V.” is a major poem? Something in the brittle artifice of the poem’s Homeric simile, some sense of the poem not reaching deeply enough, makes me think I’d hesitate — with the qualification that there is clearly the possibility of a much larger, much more free and deep poetry here, unlike McAuley’s. What matters here, in short, in this as in many other poems in The New Australian Poetry is the language-centred nature of the writing and the way this new centre changes how poems are “about” things or have themes to do with the real world. For, at the very least, there is surely something extremely precarious in the more traditionalist poets confidently re-iterating their knowledge of the “good” and the “true” like so many latterday Dr. Johnsons refuting Berkeley (who has now grown to the proportions of Einsteinian physics, Heisenberg particle theory, Hjelsmslevian linguistics, Freudian interpretive procedures, and modern quantitative logical systems) with a deft kick at the nearest gum-tree. The object is indeed there — and perhaps beautifully so and of great concern to poets — but it may, in a structural sense, be of no great matter to the way a modern poem will have to be written “about” it.
    It is this quality of containing both specific and unspecific meanings and of letting the poem differentiate its moral pre-occupations or not that strikes me as one of the most important things that many of the poems in Tranter’s anthology offer to us. An attention to the writing of poetry as a process, an interest in the inner workings of perceptions and an assumption that language is the dimensional force which makes for a requisitely many-sided coherence are entirely proper to such an enterprise. Inevitably, there are many contemporary poets (and there are several in the anthology) who simplify this requirement for a modern poetry into a mere rejection of the probable truth that it is an oppression to let reality be ruled by other people’s home-made dicta. But I am more concerned with the way that the best of the book’s poems do work, and with the implications of their tentativeness and their language-centredness.
    I find two broad emphases throughout many of the book’s poems. Firstly, I find the possibility of a poetry open and diverse enough in elemental structure (and sufficiently city-centred) to resist the temptation to pin poetry to Australia’s cultural heart, thereby delicately killing it. When the poetry is good, the culture is allowed to invade it, to be gathered by it and be defined by it — rather than the poets asserting that the centre is a desert or a bricolage or a repressive version of the Australian tradition or Max Harris’s plea (may god and Melbourne’s Greeks forbid it!) for a return to dialect. I will be the first to admit that all is not well on this score in The New Australian Poetry, for the fascination with the USA has been too unchallenging. But at least other areas of cultural censorship have been crossed and left behind.
    Secondly, I find a poetry whose repeated movement, in terms of specifics and non-specifics, is one of going outwards, of discovery and (at moments) of transcendence. I choose that last word carefully, for the irony and stylishness and verbal complexity of many of the poems disguise the real nature of their tentativeness: as does our own proximity to the period in which they were written. To quote his work again, John Forbes can carry his transcendence more lightly in “Ode to Tropical Skiing” than I can climbing up the other (critical) side of the snow-peak.

After breakfast in the philippines
I take a bath
                          & it’s a total fucking gas

Enjoy that ice cream, Gerald,
                          the sun sparkling
                          on its white frostiness
is the closest you’ll ever get to St Moritz,
racing up the tiny snow fields on the side of a pill
                          as beside you the young girl’s
mirrored goggles reflect all Switzerland
like a chocolate box at the speed of sound
                          & like the ashtray he/ she you & it
                          are a total fucking gas

Asleep in
the milk bars
daylight saving annuls our tuxedo
                          & happy to breathe again
like a revived dance craze
we gulp fresh air, our speeches to the telephone
                so various,
                                      so beautiful —
                  who loves at close range
                          like they do thru a tube?
& when the sun polishes the wires gold then invisible
                          a million cheer-up telegrams
                          collapse in the snow
while Mandy & I have a glass of Coca-Cola
                  as we fly past the moon &
after the piano goes to sleep in our arms
                                            we wake up
                                            & it’s a total fucking gas

                                            Was that a baby
or a shirt factory?
no one can tell in this weather, for tho
the tropics are slowly drifting apart & a
                          vicious sludge blurs
                  the green banks of the river, a chalet
drifts thru the novella where I compare thee
                  to a surfboard lost in Peru,
                  flotsam like a crate of strong liquor
                                              that addles our skis
                                              & when they bump
                                                                it’s a total fucking gas

I am sure that there are many readers, and many poets, to whom this poem will fall below serious consideration. It is to that issue and to what I have called the language-centredness of The New Australian Poetry that I want to turn in a later article. And at the same time I hope to discuss in more detail what I see as the real achievements and equally real problems of the collection’s major poems, in order to understand what their likely future home might be in Australia. For it is (to give Tranter, the poet this time, the last words) “here, you can become a little more/ becoming.”

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